Cash-strapped academics are turning to crowdsourcing: asking the public to help with everything from reading ancient texts to star-gazing

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n 2007 Chris Lintott, an astronomer at Oxford University, faced a dilemma. He had images of a million galaxies taken by Nasa’s Hubble space telescope but he could not figure out what to do with them.

The task of sorting them was immense and computers simply were not capable of categorising the galaxies — a vital process that would enable astronomers to explore their patterns and anomalies.

The only solution was to use the human brain, so Lintott asked a student to do it. “Kevin classified 50,000 galaxies in a week,” he says. “It was a week that he would never choose to relive and after that he refused to do any more.”

Faced with a lack of options and limited funds, Lintott and his team put together a website that allowed members of the public to access the images. It guided them through the classification process, asking them to sort